XL Catlin partners with AI start-up Cytora

XL Catlin’s internal innovation team Accelerate announced that it is working with Cytora, a United Kingdom-based insurtech start-up that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and open source data to improve the way insurers quantify, select and price risk.

A joint press release issued on Monday from XL Catlin and Cytora said that the insurance and reinsurance company will use the start-up’s expertise in sourcing and analyzing data from multiple sources and combining them to create new insights into risk. Cytora’s risk engine captures the online footprint of risks clients are continuously facing by crawling data from company websites, news articles and government datasets and processes it using AI algorithms in order to predict future claims, attractive risk profiles and quality of risks, the release said. These insights will help actuaries at portfolio level to identify new profitable segments, help underwriters to improve risk selection and provide tailored risk solutions for clients.

“We are experimenting with a wide range of cutting-edge technologies to explore what is possible. But we cannot do it alone,” Vincent Branch, chief executive of Accelerate, said in the release. “We need to partner with like-minded start-ups like Cytora that can help us embed those new technologies to transform our product design, pricing, underwriting, claims and risk engineering capabilities to the benefit of our clients and brokers.”

XL Catlin is excited to be working with Cytora, Branch said, a company that has, “in just three years, built such an excellent reputation around its ability to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help drive better business decisions.”

Richard Hartley, CEO and co-founder of Cytora, added that the company is “enabling insurers to differentiate between risks at a higher level of granularity than ever before, and discover new profitable segments in areas where they have limited underwriting experience. We believe this is the future of insurance and we are delighted to partner with a forward thinking, innovative company like XL Catlin who not only shares our vision but is also investing in realizing major gains through the use of external data,” he continued.

XL Catlin established its Accelerate team in November 2016 to leverage commercial opportunities arising from new technologies and to drive transformational innovation by working closely with the business. The partnership follows the appointment of Ashish Umre as Accelerate partner, artificial intelligence.